It’s about time that marketers understand something:consumers don’t want to marketed to”. They are sick of commercials, sick of ads on mobile devices and they wield a lot of power holding brands accountable for bad marketing, ads and products.
Social media marketing was proclaimed as the savior of marketing by pseudo social media marketing experts who wanted you to buy their books and pay them for speaking engagements. As more and more people followed them on social media their ego’s went unchecked, but it’s time to admit that for the most part, social media marketing is as dead as Johhny Maziel’s career.
Does this mean that marketers can ignore social media? No. It means that consumers will us social media when they want to talk to you. It has become more of a customer service/complaint/comment channel, but make no mistake as soon as you try and turn the conversation into a sales pitch they will drop you like a bad habit.
If brans really want to succeed today digital has to be tightly integrated into their overall marketing strategy. Social media cannot and should not be left to an intern or an agency, but rather someone who can humanize your brand and become the voice of your brand.
We have all read how Twitter seems to be in trouble, but a lot of us get our news and updates via Twitter. However, “sponsored Tweets, are seldom clicked on and Twitter is trying to find out “how the hell do we make money with all these people using our platform?”. Another brick in the wall of social media marketing is dead.
I just threw out a lot of books that I had received for review on social media marketing over the years as they are no longer relevant and some are just wrong. One day marketers will learn not to trust hype or self proclaimed experts.